Defending the Christian faith and promoting its wisdom against the secular and religious challenges of our day.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Scripture, Inerrancy, and its Detractors

The doctrine of the “Inerrancy of Scripture” claims that in
their original writing, Scripture was fully
God-breathed and without error, as many verses affirm:

All
Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting
and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly
equipped for every good work. (2 Tim. 3:16-17)

Above
all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the
prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the
will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy
Spirit. (2 Peter 1:19-21)

However, many have faulted this doctrine, claiming that we
can’t even begin to talk about inerrancy without the original writings in hand.
New Testament Critic Bart Ehrman is one of them:

What
good is it to say that the autographs [the originals] were inspired? We
don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies. And the vast
majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different
from them…(Bart Ehrman and Daniel
Wallace in Dialogue: The Reliability of the NT, 86)

Does the fact that we do not have the originals present an
insurmountable obstacle? I don’t think so. For one thing, we have the
overwhelming affirmation of Scripture that it is all God-breathed. We also have
reason.

When we look at a sunset, we also do not see (or have) the
“originals.” We do not see directly what we are looking at. Instead, we “see”
an electro-chemical mental reproduction – a “copy” – of the “original.” Our
eyes break down the incoming light – and the light is not even the seen objects
– into millions of simultaneous electro-chemical reactions that are transported
into the depths of our brain, and immediately we have a trustworthy series of
images of the external world.

Although we cannot literally see the external world, we have
a trustworthy facsimile of it. This facsimile or “copy” enables us to drive our
cars and make thousands of appropriate decisions every minute.

Can we therefore say that there exists a stable, fully
reliable and believable external reality, even though we cannot directly
apprehend it? Certainly! Likewise, can we say that there exist fully reliable
and believable inerrant originals, even though we don’t possess them? Why not?

Ehrman might challenge the analogy in this manner:

When
it comes to the Scriptures, we have thousands of textual variants among
the 5,800 NT manuscripts and fragments. There are no “variants” when it
comes to the external world.

However, such a response misses the point of the analogy.
Ehrman’s point had been that “We don’t have the originals.” Therefore, it is
not possible to talk about inerrant originals. However, we can talk about a
totally reliable external reality even though we can’t directly see it. Even
though we don’t directly have the originals, we can still assert that they
are/were fully reliable.

Besides, we see
reality in “variant” ways. However, despite this very obvious fact, we
should not conclude that reality is
“variant.” Nor should we conclude that our textual variants in any way
undermines the doctrine of “inerrancy.”

Of course this raises another question:

Even
if the originals are inerrant, in light of the many textual variants, can
we say with any confidence what the originals looked like?

While the radical critic Ehrman would answer “no,” the faith
of many has only been reaffirmed through the study of the variants. NT scholar
William Warren writes:

I
would say that our [present composite NT] text almost certainly represents
a form that is almost identical to the original documents. (122)

Another NT scholar, Craig Evans, affirms the same thing:

Given
the evidence, we have every reason to have confidence in the text of
Scripture. This does not mean that we possess 100% certainty that we have
the exact wording in every case, but we have good reason to believe that
what we have preserved in the several hundred manuscripts of the first
millennium is the text that the writers of Scripture penned.

Similarly, NT textual critic Silvie Raquel writes:

I also
have studied New Testament textual criticism and, by contrast with Ehrman,
have found confirmation about the validity of the text…by defective
reasoning, misuse of the evidence, and a misconception of inerrancy,
Ehrman fails to build a case for the unreliability of the New Testament
text as a sacred and inspired text. (173, 185)

Don’t think that this question of “inerrancy” is just a
stale and irrelevant academic disagreement. It is essential to our lives. If we
are convinced that the Bible isn’t entirely
trustworthy, then we are doomed to always have to decide what parts of
Scripture we are to trust and what to discard as untrustworthy. Consequently,
instead of Scripture judging us, we are judging Scripture. Instead of Scripture
reigning over us, it is our judgment that reigns over Scripture. And if our
judgment is more reliable than Scripture, well, we might as well just read the
New York Times!

However, all of the books of Scripture regard Scripture as
supreme and authoritative. Isaiah would
certainly agree:

The
grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands
forever. (Isaiah 40:8)